The Work of Justice: Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah

| Sally Butler
 + Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah Taring Padi, 2024. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Louis Lim. Installation view.

The Work of Justice: Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah

The Work Of Justice: Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah | Sally Butler

‘Justice is never full and progress never comes easily, but it does come, and there is no reason to….focus on the ideal-typical goals of justice over the work of actually making it happen.’1

Griffith University Art Museum’s (GUAM) exhibition showcasing 26 years of work from the Indonesian collective Taring Padi is an experience of inspiration and imperative, and a metaphorical shove in the back to step up for social justice; locally and globally. From their 1998 origin in Yogyakarta, the grass-roots community-driven street art approach of Taring Padi, who regard themselves as activist-artsworkers, broadened to include a global outreach of collaborations, workshops, discussions, and exhibitions. Australian artist Richard Bell invited Taring Padi to Meanjin/Brisbane whilst both were exhibiting in documenta fifteen (2022) in Kassel, Germany. With key motivating pillars of demands for sovereignty, decolonisation, and solidarity, Taring Padi had considerable common ground for artistic collaboration with Bell and his proppaNOW Contemporary Aboriginal Artist Collective colleagues.

The above-mentioned publication, Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities (2022), is a United States case study with relevant insights about recent growth in what it describes as ERJ (economic and racial justice) coalitions. The authors argue that the development of ERJ coalitions are seeing the networked capacity of unions and community organisations to have greater impact in ‘ideological critique, antiracist messages, and demands for transformation rather than negotiation’.2 Activist art collectives, like Taring Padi and proppaNOW, networking across the globe, appear to align with this mode of grassroots solidarity in shifting mindsets. Taring Padi’s mobile global inclusivity generates and sustains justice coalitions similar to those described in Justice at Work where: ‘No magic formula for a fairer world exists, but multisited movements are in a way their own formula’.3 Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah demonstrates several dimensions of what this work of justice actually looks like.

…. the work of learning

As spectators at the GUAM exhibition there is a bit of work to do. The entry corridor (and its ceiling) and three exhibition spaces are tightly displayed with floor to ceiling and smaller banners, murals, woodblock prints, paintings, and sculptures. Puppets (cut-out cardboard mounted on sticks based on the Indonesian wayang tradition of performance storytelling) are dotted through the spaces; often engaging in dialogue with proppaNOW through satirical figures of dugong, emu, koalas, and militia kangaroo, and strategic use of image/text aesthetics. The collaborative mural created by the two collectives features on an exterior wall visible to passersby both on and off Griffith University campus. Designed as instruments to understand the social and cultural history of Indonesia through a contemporary (and now global) lens, Taring Padi’s work is a textbook lesson in what has been described as ‘activist literacy’, advocating attention to ‘agency, coalition building, and collaboration, an awareness of power structures, and the deliberate use and interpretation of language’.4

 + Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah Taring Padi, 2024. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Louis Lim. Installation view.
 + Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah Taring Padi 2024. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Louis Lim. Installation view.

Signature Taring Padi artworks, known as ‘Justice Banners’, dominate the exhibition. They embody densely detailed and interwoven political storytelling that reference specific communities, individuals, and social and political events; and require a lot of looking. The exhibit’s Retomar Nossa Terra/Rebut Tanah Kita (2023) epitomises this mode of visual storytelling now gluing global networks. The banner is an outcome of Taring Padi’s residency at the Florestan Flores National School in rural Brazil. Co-organised by Amsterdam’s Framer Framed arts and culture hub, Taring Padi, and the Sao Paulo-based Jewish organisation, Casa do Povo (The Peoples’ House), the residency involved Taring Padi artists working with the Artist Brigade wing of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Ruais Sem Terra (MST), the Brazilian landless workers’ movement. MST’s struggle to maintain community land occupation aligns with similar struggles of rural communities in the Indonesian archipelago with whom Taring Padi collaborate. Other contributors to the banner included, ‘Visitors, students, and anyone drawn to join the group, engaging in conversations, jokes, and playful activities’, whilst ‘remaining sharply critical of oppressive systems, from colonialism to modern day agro-industry’.5

 + Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah Taring Padi, 2024. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Louis Lim. Installation view.

Artworks, and thus exhibitions, like these provide little gestalt aesthetic experience where perception coalesces into a concept, but rather convey snapshots of bigger stories, and triggers to be curious, concerned and more informed. It’s a reminder that contemporary spectatorship is contextualised by an immense and immediate web-availability of knowledge. Audiences are now highly independent empowered learners and this exhibition envelops visitors with an urgency to do so. As mentioned, the GUAM exhibit is relatively overcrowded to the point of being claustrophobic, with the effect that it feels like being in the middle of a crowded street march—very dynamic, immediate and loud. Audience members were seen taking phone shots of artworks and wall text presumably to follow up online and learn more. The exhibition avoided being a neat and tidy aesthetic package preferring instead to portray a sense of having only touched the surface of something that matters deeply to these people, to the world, and hopefully to oneself.

 + Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah Taring Padi, 2024. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Louis Lim. Installation view.
 + Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah Taring Padi 2024. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Louis Lim. Installation view.

… the work of healing

If Taring Padi is about hope for a fairer world, it also inspires fronting up to mistakes, misunderstandings, and making the time and space for healing. Collaboration with the forementioned Casa de Povo was a direct response to the documenta fifteen controversy and prompt removal of an early Taring Padi banner titled People’s Justice (2002) that included depictions of anti-semitic figures. Taring Padi expressed deep regret for offence caused by the imagery, and a commitment to ‘continue dialogue regarding how this incident occurred and genuine intention behind the artwork.’6 Taring Padi also stated it was now ‘essential to allow a space for discussion’. Casa de Povo’s mission statement illustrates their in-built agility in responding to this need for dialogue, where: ‘Its work axes (memory; collective and socially-engaged practices; dialogue and involvement with its surroundings) stem from contemporary contexts in direct relation with Casa do Povo’s historical, Jewish and humanist premises.’7

 + Taring Padi: Tanah Tumpah Darah Taring Padi, 2024. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Louis Lim. Installation view.

The residency and subsequent exhibitions are part of these multisited movements forming global justice coalitions that buy time for nuanced exchange and healing beyond the exchange of blunt media headlines. As a university art museum, GUAM, is of course an ideal space for community healing to take place through hosting exhibitions, symposia and residencies, and allowing mobile, responsive collectives such as Taring Padi, Casa do Povo and proppaNOW to inspire the work of justice. It is why we have, and need, university art museums like these embedded in our CBDs. The exhibition and associated symposium, talks, studio visits, and workshops, profile the international context of Australia’s Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, decolonisation, and social and human rights. Ngaliya Buddjong Djarra (Our Mother Earth), the external mural resulting from the Taring Padi/proppaNOW collaboration, responds to the title of the exhibition Tanah Tumpah Darah (translating roughly as Motherland) in aligning the histories and leaders of Indonesian and Australian human rights and land rights activism. The collaborative work is an icon of a social justice coalitions in identifying specific Indonesian and Australian Aboriginal activism leaders within a landscape of the ongoing legacy of Dutch and British colonisation. The banner envisions a confluence that situates viewers at the table of justice work to be done. The table is already half-occupied by figures symbolising the institutional means of injustice and it is clearly up to us whether we step up to the table in joining the counter-balance of global justice coalitions.


Notes

1. Greg Schrock and Marc Doussard, Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2022, p. 14.

2. Schrock and Doussard, Justice at Work, p. 6.

3. Schrock and Doussard, Justice at Work, p. 6.

4. Virginia Crisco, Activist Literacy: Engaging Democracy in the Classroom and the Community [Dissertation], Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2005, p. 4, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3176773/; accessed 10 April 2024. 

5. Dewi Laurente, ‘Co-creating in Political Solidarity: MST and Taring Padi on the making of Retomer Nossa Terra/Rebut Tanah Kita’, Tanah Merdeka, exhibition catalogue, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2023, p.10.

6. https://documentafifteen/de/en/news/statement-bytaring-padi-ondismantlingpeoplesjustice/, accessed 10 April 2024.

[vii] https://casadopovo.org.br/en/, accessed 10 April 2024.

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